Review: Tyler Childers is electric and full of rural mischief on ‘Snipe Hunter’

You are likely to catch on to the spirit Tyler Childers is conjuring on his seventh and newest album “Snipe Hunter” pretty quickly.

The mood is loose, electric and almost dangerously animated. Then you fall into the record’s namesake tune, “Snipe Hunt,” about two-thirds of the way through the 13-song spree. It begins with laughter, glides alongside call-and-response screams from within the recording studio, gathers into a whirling blast of sound and finally melts into a big beat manifesto.

Bingo. The attitude is affirmed.

But as is often the case with Childers’s best songs, there is a lot brewing under the surface.

The lyrics to “Snipe Hunt” are wily enough to befit the title. In North American folklore, a snipe hunt is something of a fool’s errand, an exercise where an eager (but often gullible) subject is lured into tracking a beast of indeterminate description — meaning, one that doesn’t really exist.

There is such a thing as a snipe — a long-billed bird, in fact — but that’s not the prize here. The trophy is as much pride as anything. When the duped hunter is eventually dumped in the wilderness to search for his prey, he is left alone and humiliated. Any pride at stake goes up in smoke.

Leave it to Childers to call upon such rural mischief as a means of reflection, both worldly and personal.

“And that’s the way that I feel when I look at our past,” he sings. “And the handshakes you gave me, if you’re callin’ them that. And the snickers you tried to pass off as laughs. And the way your eyes never met mine.”

Lordy, the now-stadium-sized Lawrence County songsmith certainly suffers no fools. But as the rest of “Snipe Hunter” reveals itself, he certainly doesn’t mind stirring up a fuss with them.

The majority of the new album bears a musicality that is darkly loose. The sense of outskirts animation that fueled past favorites like “Country Squire” still inform a very natural sense of storytelling ripe with Appalachian candor. But there’s a troublemaking spirit at work, too, whether it’s in the level of roots-savvy rhythm that resembles a funkier version of The Band (if that’s possible) or a series of sagas that don’t mind dropping a few F-bombs for color.

Hey, country radio never fully buddied up to Childers, so why not?

The resulting looseness may be the product of a shift in producers, but who knows? After three self-produced albums that cemented his stardom and two preceding ones overseen by fellow Kentuckian Sturgill Simpson that established it, Childers goes outside the Appalachian box to team up with studio maverick Rick Rubin on “Snipe Hunter.”

For the uninitiated, Rubin’s client list includes Metallica, AC/DC, Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Public Enemy and, perhaps of greater relevance here, the “American Recordings” series that concluded, in brilliantly unornamental fashion, the career of Johnny Cash.

Rubin is all over the mix of Americana and psychedelia that permeates “Snipe Hunter.” You hear it in rusty keyboard clatter that triggers the more literal hunting exploits of “Dirty Ought Trill,” the highway call of “Down Under” (an Aussie parable with the clever Childers through-line of “Down under is forever and a day”) and the Eastern intrigue that comes wrapped in country foil for “Tirtha Yatra.”

Rubin and Childers are such cunning and resourceful stylists that it’s tough to tell how much of “Snipe Hunter” was informed by the former’s studio invention and what was the steadfast country ingenuity the latter welded into the songs in the first place.

Regardless, it’s a complimentary and often raucous mix with Nick Sanborn of the electropop duo Sylvian Esso and Childers himself credited with “additional production.”

Curiously, the two tunes on “Snipe Hunter” that recall the starker, more sobering terrain earmarked for such early Childers gems as “Universal Sound” and “House Fire” are the ones he has been performing live for over a decade but are just now getting an official studio album debut.

The first is the beautiful “Oneida,” a country waltz detailing a romance separated by age but not sentiment (“Come in where I can harmonize on a line or two, but this song’s all you”). The other, “Nose on the Grindstone,” is the harrowing rural farewell of a coal-mining father casting his son into a turbulent world (“There’s hurt you can cause time alone cannot heal”).

Such works are reminders of the intensity Childers summons in his music, one that naturally extends to his singing. The majority of “Snipe Hunter,” though, is more celebratory. Such a sensibility is shared in “Cuttin’ Teeth,” a snapshot of a musical youth spent in the company of jovial “deadbeats.”

“You can yell or you can croon with a catchy song or two,” Childers sings over a James Barker pedal steel guitar serenade that recalls the trippy 1970s hijinks of New Riders of the Purple Sage. “There’s room for err, if the band is there.”

Ladies and gentleman, on “Snipe Hunter,” Childers is most assuredly “there.”

This story was originally published July 25, 2025 at 12:01 AM.